Britsky retweeted
>I'm not on benefits
>Paying a rent from the 90s
Many such cases.
'I'm a single mum on £41,000 and limit my weekly shop to £40.' What do you want from the Budget? bbc.in/3W7Qkt9
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Chloe earns roughly the UK median full-time salary and her south London maisonette rent is subsidised via a housing association. London private rents average £2,338 per month while general needs social rents average around £670 per month.
bbc.com/news/articles/…
ons.gov.uk/employmentandl…
gov.uk/government/new…
ons.gov.uk/economy/inflat…
Britsky retweeted
Confirmation to me yesterday from the Government that HMS Protector wasn’t available in Antarctica last year and now won’t be available this year either.
The Royal Navy’s only ice-patrol ship has effectively been retired over a decade early. Will the Government buy a UOR replacement or are we now going to have a multi-year capability gap?
I get a lot of stick from the MOD for tabling written questions, but without them, this sort of information simply wouldn’t be available.
Defence Minister @LukePollard admits HMS Protector will not deploy to Antarctica for the 2026/27 season "due to unforeseen circumstances".
Protector was in refit since May (until towed to Devonport in mid October) and has previously has engine problems.
questions-statements.parliam…
Photo @Rockhoppas
Britsky retweeted
Minimum wage is now £27,456. SNP additional tax on "high earners" starts at £29,527
Britsky retweeted
My first instinct is to always argue for a balance of investment across the services, and arguments for a stronger navy that start with 'we are an island' are generally utter nonsense (and should be roundly ridiculed), but you cannot help to think of priorities
Britsky retweeted
You can tell tomorrows budget is going to be brutal on anybody who works for a living…
Healey vows cheaper marmalade and gherkins in pre-Budget package of 'everyday fixes' bbc.in/4zTnQ4K
Another lost capability.
Defence Minister @LukePollard admits HMS Protector will not deploy to Antarctica for the 2026/27 season "due to unforeseen circumstances".
Protector was in refit since May (until towed to Devonport in mid October) and has previously has engine problems.
questions-statements.parliam…
Photo @Rockhoppas
Britsky retweeted
Mohmed Abdulkarim, 24, and Nouman Essghir, 24, have been charged under the National Security Act following a @TerrorismPolice investigation into an incident at RAF Fairford. They will appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court today. Read more: orlo.uk/juO7E
ALT Charging statement that confirms the Crown Prosecution Service has charged two men following the RAF Fairford incident in 2026
Britsky retweeted
It doesn't give me any joy to note, but. Those who have followed me for a while know that I was narrating the death of BOXER Batch 2 months ago already, long before gov was made to admit it.
And long, long before that I predicted the "BOXER for everything" was a financially demented proposition, doomed to die.
And it died. Nobody should be surprised it did, but once again plenty of surprise to go around.
I don't consider myself a genius or a prophet. I consider myself a rational person who can read data and take a reasonable stab at what that data implies.
But evidently even that is quite uncommon.
Britsky retweeted
Budget Week.
With the Budget coming this week, here is why a £50,000 salary in 2026 feels nothing like £50,000 used to, and the numbers to explain it.
My salary is £50,483.
Since I started as a trainee accountant on £20k in 2017:
Personal Allowance frozen at £12,570 since 2021.
Dividend allowance cut from £5,000 to £500.
Capital Gains allowance cut from £11,300 to £3,000.
Employee NI was actually cut from 12% to 8% in 2024. While this seems to be positive for the employees, it was a backhanded change. The rise was on the employer side in April 2025, and the threshold where it starts cut from £9,100 to £5,000. On my salary it’s roughly 2% extra my employer has to cough up. That’s money that could have gone into pay rises
Plan 2 Student Loan takes £139pm each month while adding £225pm in interest
Our household bills jumped from £1,241pm in 2020 to £1,695pm in 2026
Our remortgage is jumping from 4.49% (£1,170pm) to 5.52% (£1,321pm) from March 2027
Every pound I earn above £50,270 is already taxed at 51% before it touches VAT, Council Tax, or fuel.
Which allowance do you think gets raided next in the Budget: Pensions, ISAs, or CGT?
Britsky retweeted
Footage of Ukrainian Storm Shadow cruise missiles slamming into Russia’s Energia military electronics plant in Yelets this weekend.
At least 7 missiles hit the plant, damaging multiple workshops that produced batteries for a number of Russian missile systems.
Type 26 and Type 31 late. Type 23 rapidly dying. Bets on magical hybrid navy.
The window of risk is long and not closing for many years.
Britsky retweeted
The pre-pandemic rate was £8.21/hour; £13.20/hour represents a more than 60% increase in five years.
People keep saying businesses who can't pay it shouldn't employ people.
So they're not.
EXCLUSIVE
John Healey will announce plans to increase the minimum wage by nearly 4 per cent but slow the rise for young people after warnings that they are being priced out of jobs
The Times has been told that the national living wage, which applies to those aged 21 and over, is expected to rise from £12.71 to around £13.20 — an increase of 3.9 per cent
However, Healey has decided not to repeat the big rises of the past two budgets in the national minimum wage, which applies to those aged 18 to 21
It will rise broadly in line with the rate for older workers - from £10.85 to around £11.27, an increase of 3.9 per cent
It effectively spells the end of Labour’s manifesto pledge to bring the “discriminatory” minimum wage for young people into line with the living wage for older workers in this parliament
The minimum wage increased by 26 per cent between 2025 and 2026, leading to stark warnings from employers that it risked impeding efforts to get 1 million “Neets” - young people not in education, employment or training - into work.
Healey alluded to the approach in an interview with The Times last week, in which he spoke of the importance of the “trade-off between the level of the minimum wage and the employment rate”
thetimes.com/article/c9142a2…
Britsky retweeted
An increase to £13.20p/h equates to a minimum wage of £27,456, based on a 40 hour week.
Once you factor in employers NI and basic pension contributions, the MINIMUM cost to hire a 21 year old for a company would be £31,461.
This is before you factor in any overarching business costs like office space, laptops, phone, software, training, support staff, vehicles etc.
This is going to be devastating to SME's who cant put together a simple 12 month budget without the goalposts being moved & their margins squeezed.
It'll also be catastrophic to youngsters opportunities because businesses will simply not be able to afford to hire them.
What's also incredible is that anything above £50,270 is seen as 'high earnings' in the UK and is taxed at 40%!
We are governed by financially and economically illiterate morons.
This will not end well.
Britsky retweeted
A new episode of new drones spotting in British use.
Defence imagery calls this SAKER, operational with 32 RA.
It tags it as an AeroVironment WASP, which it clearly is not. I will assume it has or is REPLACING the WASPs that were in use.
From visual, it's a SkyWatch RQ-35.
Britsky retweeted
⚓📰🚨 #USNAVY UPDATE: Joint Statement, USS Colorado (SSN 788) Announced as First Submarine for Submarine Rotational Force – West
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles, and UK Secretary of State for Defence Wes Streeting are pleased to announce the designation of the USS Colorado (SSN 788) as the first U.S. Navy Virginia-class fast-attack submarine assigned to Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West) beginning in late 2027.
Britsky retweeted
Minimum wage going up to £13.20 sounds great until you realise businesses only have 3 options:
Raise prices.
Employ fewer people.
Cut costs elsewhere.
Workers need better pay. But if everything else gets more expensive, how much better off are we really?
Zero energy security under net suicide policies. I think we will hit black outs at some point in the future, ditto for water security.
